30 April 2012 5:12 PM

The real political changes of the past 25 years or so have not taken place at general elections, but within the political parties.

First, there was the destruction of ‘Old Labour’ in the early 1980s by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. These bodies, using such tactics as mandatory reselection, got rid of or drove into the SDP many Labour MPs who were morally and socially conservative. At national level, left-wing factions in the big trades unions, marshalled by the Communist party’s skilled and well-connected industrial organisation, won victories on policy (particularly defence and foreign policy) out of all proportion to the number of Communists and Communist sympathisers in the union movement.

So, in the years following Jim Callaghan’s general election defeat in 1979, the Labour Party was transformed, permanently, from top to bottom. Much of this was the work of Communist sympathisers, who had since the days of Lenin supported Labour ‘as the rope supports the hanged man’, and encouraged sympathisers to join Labour and stay out of the CP, the better to penetrate the Labour Party at the highest and lowest levels. Much less was the work of various kinds of Trotyskyists, but the media were obsessed with the insignificant role of the ‘Militant Tendency’ a front organisation and code name for tiny Trotskyist sect called the Revolutionary Socialist League, mainly concentrated in Liverpool. A major Communist Party, of the kind which operated in France and Italy, was not what Lenin and the Comintern wanted. They had long sought to take over the Labour Party instead.

Old labour knew all about this, and the party’s organisation until the 1970s was well-trained in detecting and frustrating Communist party infiltration. William Rodgers’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism successfully defeated attempts to win Labour for the (pro-Soviet) cause of unilateral nuclear disarmamament. Ex-Communists, such as the Electricians’ Union leader Frank Chapple (he left over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956) had no illusions at all about the CP’s methods and fought them without mercy (the CP never forgave him for exposing pro-Communist ballot-rigging in the union).

But these forces were weakening by the early 1980s, and the New Left of the CLPD and the LCC bypassed the old defences. There were also the new ‘Euro-Communists’, of ‘Marxism Today’, Communist Party members who had forsaken the rigid Stalinism of the old party and argued instead for a flexible, post Soviet, Gramscian approach – cultural and social revolution, not Bolshevism. Some of the cleverer Trotskyists had found their way to the same place. These became the nucleus of Blairism, which was never ‘Right-Wing’ at all. Labour’s Right Wing was by then completely dead. The New Left were bitterly hostile to the noisier, less subtle Trotskyists (such as Militant) and were happy to see Militant crushed by Neil Kinnock, a victory for the classical, subtle left over the radical, honest left. Fleet Street, in its usual idiotic way, portrayed Neil Kinnock’s crushing of Militant as the end of the Left in the Labour Party. This ludicrous myth, the opposite of the truth, is still widely believed. Ha ha. Actually, the whole of British politics would as a result shift decisively to the Left as a result.

The transformation of the Tory Party was less intentional. By bypassing the party organisation, wooing big donors and using the Murdoch Press and Saatchis to appeal directly to the electorate, and by creating a ‘leader’ who was a national semi-Presidential figure, Mrs Thatcher and her allies created a vacuum where traditional Toryism had been. The party machine atrophied. The power and significance of the leader hugely increased. But if the leader was weak, he was vulnerable. John Major became the prisoner of Michael Heseltine because of his weakness.

As for the even weaker Iain Duncan Smith, it was astonishingly easy for the media to ally with Michael Howard to overthrow IDS . Mr Howard then began a process of centralising the party, and delayed the election of his success for long enough to give David Cameron the edge over David Davis, which he would never have done in a quick contest, and - as exemplified by his action against Howard Flight for remarks made at a private meeting – sought to end the control which local associations had over candidate selection.

Now we see (as reported in ‘The Guardian’ on Monday 30th April) that a group of Tory MPs have magically teamed up to remove old-fashioned, traditional Tory MPs, such as Christopher Chope and Peter Bone, from the leadership of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers.

As the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt puts it: ‘A conversation among a couple of colleagues mushroomed into the 301 Group – the number of parliamentary seats needed to secure a majority in the next parliament – which attracted 135 Tory MPs to a meeting in January.

‘The group will on Monday show it is reshaping the Conservative parliamentary party when it takes the distinctly un-Tory step of publishing a slate of candidates for the elections to the executive of the 1922 committee. Candidates of all ages and intakes will be put forward to modernise the "antique" backbench committee, which has a hierarchical structure whereby new MPs have to defer to longer-serving colleagues in the weekly meetings.

‘ "Quite often, certainly senior members of the 1922 have seen the prime minister and the government as the opposition," says Hopkins, who is driving the changes but is not standing for election. "That is not the way to go about it. They should be challenged.’

Or, as I might put it, the remaining conservatives in the Conservative Party are to be marginalised.

Will the voters notice? Some will, but millions, I fear, will continue to vote for a party that hates them, just as millions of Labour voters have been doing since the 1980s. And the enxt general election like the last four, will be a non-contest among parties which have no serious differences among them.

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23 March 2006 10:58 AM

Politicians have a wonderful way of turning everything, even their own disgrace, to their own advantage. Both Labour and the Useless Tories have been caught out in their sneaky new practice of obtaining secret 'loans' from big donors. But rather than slinking away in shame, these worn-out parties have the nerve to use their exposure as an argument for what they call 'state funding' of political parties.

Neat, isn't it? They have been discovered doing something which is so obviously wrong that they tried to hide it. They then say, more or less "We will stop doing this if you, the taxpayers, give us so much money that we don't have to". This would be much like a burglar promising to stop burgling if he were instead given a special burglar's allowance. One, it would be utterly morally wrong. He didn't have to be a burglar in the first place. Two, you couldn't possibly trust him to keep his side of the bargain.

The major parties are in this fix because they are institutionally dead. Labour membership and Tory membership have collapsed during the Thatcher-Blair era, as both these parties have tried to appeal over the heads of traditional supporters, and to ignore their wishes. The fund-raisers, the canvassers, the envelope-stuffers and subscription collectors who keep parties going have died or drifted away, feeling that they are neither wanted nor needed.

I am told many Labour wards have had to merge with their neighbours because otherwise they can no longer get a quorum for meetings. The Tories, who debate less but socialise more, have a similar problem. The old wine and cheese gatherings have dwindled. Conservative Clubs now have to take non-Tories, even Labour voters, as members to keep their numbers up.

At their annual conferences, the seats are further and further apart to conceal the shrivelling attendance, the debates duller and duller, the average age higher and higher. Dissent is crushed. Yes, Labour roughly bundled Walter Wolfgang from the hall for heckling, with the disgraceful assistance of the police. But the savage Tory purge of Howard Flight, for mildly unorthodox remarks made at a private meeting, was not much different. Today's police - ever willing to keep a close eye on speech and thought - would no doubt have found a way to help, if the Tories had been the government.

The truth is the big parties mistrust and despise their members and their voters, and only survive by misleading them about what they are up to. That is why 'spin', or organised lying as it ought to be called, has become so common. That is why they seek money from wherever they can get it - and rich men always want to be on good terms with the powerful, or the potentially powerful. This sort of fundraising is squalid and discreditable, and ought to be banned.

But if it were, where would the cash come from to employ the parasites, propagandists, backstairs-crawlers and power-worshippers which modern political parties seem to need to survive? Why, nowhere, of course. So they seek to steal the money from us by force, through our taxes. Now, I regard tax as legalised theft already and suspect that about 90 pence in every pound I pay is mis-spent. But at least there is a reasonable excuse for this - it is after all meant for good purposes, health, education, pensions, policing. There is absolutely no justification for us being forced - under the threat of imprisonment - to pay for the slimy propaganda of political parties so discredited and clapped out that they cannot even raise their own running costs from their own supporters. The nerve of it.